The Dead Have Ruled Earth For 200 Years

1

Dix was listening to The Pink Cure’s
“Dark Side of Dissolution” as they made planetfall. He’d never heard it before.
In fact, he hadn’t listened to a lot of Paleo-Earth music in his life. He
remembered hearing Michael Jackson, Mozart, Beethoven, Wham, and of course
Elvis, in school and at the formal parties, but he had never spent any quiet
time with the ancient songs. The accents were strange and he didn’t understand
some of the words, but as he listened to Dark Side he was surprised at how
personal it sounded.

When the singer sang about time, Dix
found himself in the words. He had wasted most of his life “In a careless way.”
He didn’t know what “frittering” was, but he knew what it was to “waste his
heartbeats in a careless way.”

It took almost two hours for his
suit to drop him down through the radiation, and into the brightly colored
clouds of the old world’s sky. He had to turn up his helmet’s shading to keep
the sun’s light from blinding him. The album repeated twice in his suit before
the robotic feet touched the surface of the paleo-homeworld. By that time he
was thinking what a shame it was that no other recordings by that singer had
survived. Could there be any more on the surface of the planet itself again
after all that time?

“Home, going home again,” the
primitive musician sang sadly, like it was both what he badly wanted and yet
also something he was afraid of.

The night before re-entry, Dix had
watched two old Paleo-Earth films. The first was a big and exciting movie about
some imaginary aliens attacking Paleo-Earth. He had really enjoyed that one.
The second was a documentary about small black and white flightless birds
called penguins who lived in the ice and snow. He was amazed as he saw how the
baby birds were able to find their fathers out of crowds of hundreds of birds.
They knew their parents and found their way to them simply by instinct. He
wondered if he would get to see a Penguin while he was on the planet.

He removed the shading from his
helmet right away so he could see where he was. The wretched dead were already coming
at him. The voice in his head told him that an estimated four hundred infected
were approaching. Up above he could see Greg and Anya were still descending.
Dix activated the automated turrets on his shoulders and authorized them to
begin their passive defense cycle. The internal speakers adjusted themselves to
muffle the sound from the gunfire, but all the same he could hear the
screaming. It was far louder and higher pitched than in the simulations.

Anya’s suit came down on top of the
horde. Arms and leg-bones snapped and cracked beneath her. A head burst like a
balloon filled with red and black fluid.

“I fell asleep!” she laughed. “I
actually fell asleep for about a half-hour on the way down. Can you believe
it?”

Her turrets roared into action. Bursts
of light exploded from the barrels until she turned her unit towards the
monsters. The voice in Dix’s head updated the numbers of the approaching
infected down to 190. That meant they had already destroyed more than two
hundred of them. His cannon began its warm-up cycle in case one of the compound
creatures found them.

“Why are there so damn many of
them?” Greg’s voice was quiet as he touched down. His suit was almost toppled
by the unsteady footing of the corpses beneath him. They had already begun wriggling
and attempting to reform. He steadied himself. “There can’t have been this many
humans on Earth, and it’s been so long.”

“Where are we?” Anya asked.

“The system is still calculating. I
think we’re somewhere in France, maybe Berlin?”

It was just getting dark. Where the
sun was dipping beyond the horizon, great billowing purple and black clouds
were interrupted by the orange and red of a sky thick with pollutants. Having
never been on a planet with a full atmosphere before, Dix and Anya were in awe
of the sight before them. As their suites mowed down the last of the initial
wave, it was the sky they kept their eyes on.

A splash of infected fluid coated
Dix’s screen momentarily, but the system automatically hit it with a high-level
burst to evaporate the liquid. If he had blinked, he would have missed it.

“Berlin wasn’t in France.” Greg corrected her. “Berlin was its own country.”

“Does it matter?” Dix snorted.
“That’s a little like debating what part of the jungle was owned by what
monkeys.”

Greg’s voice cracked in shock,
“Monkeys? Dix, if the Paleo-Humans were so dumb and we were so smart, then what
are the three of us doing here? They invented all kinds of things that have
never been duplicated.”

“They made the virus,” Dix argued.

“Yeah, they made good and bad
things; that’s what you get to do when you’re more advanced than we are.” Greg
sounded like a professor lecturing his students. Dix hated when he did that,
mostly because he got the feeling that Anya liked it. He got sick and tired of
Greg acting like he was smarter than everyone.

The monsters had stopped advancing.
The three invaders could see a few stragglers wandering back and forth,
limping, crawling, and staggering, but none of them were moving with any
purpose or heading towards the three humans anymore. The automated systems in
their suites reflexively took samples of the mutated flesh beneath their feet.
The air was tested and recorded. None of the infected biological or
environmental material was actually kept, or would be taken off-world, but it
was tested. Great care was taken to make sure that none of the diseases on
Earth might escape with the team. They would only take what was essential with
them when they left, and the suits would be sterilized before anyone was
allowed out.

“Yeah, but I mean, why don’t we just
wipe them out? If a couple hundred of us came down here I bet we could mow them
all down in a couple of weeks. I mean, I dunno. How big is the world? How many
of them are there?”

“The Earth is very big. It’s larger
than the Mars and people used to live everywhere. Beyond that, the infected
have babies a lot more often than humans do, so there are more of them now than
there were people living here in pre-history.”

Dix’s turrets started automatically firing
again at the wriggling mass beneath them. He added, “And they don’t stay dead.
Half of the ones we just flattened will be up and moving again.”

“Maybe in just a few minutes,” Greg
agreed.

A woman came suddenly running
towards them. The light hit her face just so that all three of the explorers
got a nice clear look at her. Her skin was pink and clean and smooth. Not only
didn’t she look infected, but she was beautiful. “Like a movie star,” Anya
thought to herself.

But the turrets fired at her
automatically and her body was ripped this way and that from the different
guns. Her torso was torn to soup and the red liquid painted the ground beneath
her to a distance of maybe five meters. Her torn mouth opened and she looked
like she was screaming, though no sound was picked up over the guns.

“Oh My Paleo-God!” Anya gasped.

“Was she alive?” Dix shouted loudly
and accusingly into the speakers. He stung his friends’ ears. If they could
have, they would have cupped their hands over their ears. Greg did raise his
arm halfway, as if trying to do just that.

“That’s impossible,” Greg replied.
His voice was adult and skeptical. “There hasn’t been an uninfected human on
Earth in over two hundred years. Some of them are more obvious that others, but
you can be sure she was a monster, just like all the rest. Wait a bit, and her
bits will start to move again, just like all the others.”

“Yeah, but there’s no time for
that.” Dix stated the obvious.

They set up a beacon at their
landing position, to make it easier for them to return to the ship, which was
waiting for them up in orbit. There weren’t any more attacks while they locked
the beacon in place, but as they finished, Dix used the telescopic function to
see farther into the city. Hundreds of infected were beginning to make their
way towards them.

The three suits lifted up off of the ground
and soared in an arc to a new position two kilometers away from the drop point.
It might have once been an outdoors eating area, either a part of a restaurant
or a park. There was a building nearby. It had collapsed beyond the point where
they could easily see what it had once been. Two figures were laying on the
benches and another four or five were walking around aimlessly in the general
area. As they landed, the locals began screaming and contorting their faces.
One of them managed to get close enough that he actually wrapped his teeth
around the metal of Greg’s suit. One of the figures lying on the benches never
got up at all. It appeared to be already destroyed. The automated defenses
turned the other infected to juice and streamers before the people in the suits
even got a good look at them.

Greg took a moment to replay the
visual at half speed. The looks on their faces were horrible. He’d never seen
anyone so spastically angry. He couldn’t help but think it was a good thing to
end them. No one should have to feel so much pain. He took a moment to set the
remains on fire, to make sure that these ones didn’t reform. He regretted not
thinking of doing it to the initial horde.

“How far are we?” Anya asked. She
said it like she was asking both of them, but Dix understood that the question
was really meant for Greg. He would have paid more attention to the briefing.

“We don’t know the exact location.
It should be possible to find it in one of the larger cities.

“Right, but only the ones which were
more advanced are likely to still have any,” Anya corrected.

“Right, if it’s still anywhere.”
Greg sounded professorial.

“Is fire the only way to permanently
destroy them?” Anya asked Greg.

“No,” Dix answered. “If you put enough
bullets in them, sometimes they will get up and sometimes they won’t. Like that
pile of bodies from before? Maybe half of them are wriggling by now and they
will eventually get up and start shambling. The other half will stay dead.
There’s no reason to it. You can shoot ‘em in the head or the heart or the
stomach and they’re just as likely each time.”

“That’s right, Dix. They say that in
tests there have been some infected that have been killed a dozen or more times
and keep getting up. A few fall down the first time. While no one is sure why,
Cohen’s theory is that the difference is the willpower of the infected. He
wrote that they had to want it.”

“Didn’t Ledwell hypothesize that the
difference was who the infected were when they were alive?” Dix showed off his
knowledge.

But Greg laughed softly, “No one
credible believes that. And really it doesn’t make any sense when you think
about it. When a baby is born infected, what kind of a person was she before
she was born?”

Dix frowned, but didn’t answer. In
the distance he saw a female figure shambling along. This one looked like a
classic corpse. He magnified the visual. Half of the skin on her face was
missing and the muscle beneath it was visible. It looked like she had a crack
in her front incisor. She walked with a limp, and her neck was bent at a hard
angle to the concrete below. She had once been wearing some kind of a business
suit, but the front of it had been torn open as if someone had done it
specifically to get at her breasts. The left nipple was framed by a ripped
baby-blue bra cup. Her areola looked pink and healthy and normal.

She was beyond the range of the
automatic turrets, so he reached for the hand cannon and took aim at her.
Moments later she was caught in an explosion powerful enough to tear a crater
in the street below her. The woman was disintegrated in a white burst of flame.
Pebbles began to fall from the sky.

“Shit, Dix!” Warn a girl?” Anya
barked at him.

“Sorry,” He barely pronounced. He
kept his eye on the spot where the woman had been standing. There was a deep
hole in the street. He could see one of her legs. It lay there, gently burning
like a darkening marshmallow, not showing any sign of moving ever again.

He felt a little better.

The three suits marched right into
the center of town. They were too wide to walk more than two abreast, so they
went one at a time instead. Dix went first. Anya was in the center and Greg
followed behind. As they walked, Greg started to tell them about the buildings
and structures they were passing. He pointed out which vehicles were cars and
which were “taxis.” He explained the difference between a restaurant and a
supermarket.

The three of them stopped and gasped
when a flock of a hundred or more black birds flew over their heads. None of
them had ever seen an animal outside of captivity. A single one of those
animals would be worth more than any town back on the Mars. To see them flying
free and un-captured, un-owned, was like seeing diamonds and precious nuggets
used for pavement.

“How come they get to live on
Paleo-Earth still?” Dix asked rhetorically.

“The disease is limited to humans
and a few primate species,” Greg explained.

“I know that. I just mean, it isn’t
fair. I have to pay my air bill every month. They just fly through it like it’s
water. I just mean it isn’t fair.”

“It’s their world now,” Anya’s voice
sounded like she was smiling. She said it like she thought it was beautiful
that the world belonged to the birds.

Dix would rather it belonged to
people, people like him.

The voice in his head warned Dix
that one of the larger infected was approaching from in front and below. It
must be in the “subway.” He had read all about the vast train systems that ran
underneath all of the Paleo-Earth cities.

The three explorers stopped and
braced themselves for the fight. They prepared their suits’ real guns, the
manual ones. So far, only Dix had used his cannon since they landed. The
monster began breaking through the road before Anya’s gun was finished cycling
on, so Dix and Greg had to start the battle without her.

When the infected flesh lost its
shape, it was usually pretty good at returning to a reasonable approximation of
what it had been previously. If an infected man’s arm was cut off, that arm
would find its way back to its body. If his head was crushed, then the cells
would attempt to reconstruct the face and teeth and hair and look like the
person they had used to be. But sometimes it went wrong. Sometimes the
reconstructing cells would get carried away and try to build something out of
the cells of more than one person. During the evacuation there were reports of
more than fifty people being joined together into a single compound nightmare
being. One of the bigger monsters could have any number of parts, dozens of
arms and legs, heads. Sometimes the extra cells would assemble into giant
parts. There was a report of a head once as large as a car supported by more
legs than a centipede. Double-sized arms or feet were not unusual. Rarely, the
ancestral memories of the cells would activate and vestigial tails, flippers,
and other useless body parts would also come into the mix.

Never the mind though, all those
many confused cells had never managed to create a brain capable of anything
more than anger and hunger.

This monster stood at about ten feet.
Three torsos had grown together. Where they met, a pair of useless withered
legs hung down, thin, hairy, almost skeletal. They were like children’s legs by
comparison. A beating mass which looked like it was trying to remember what
shape a head was sat on the top. It was wet and glistening. What looked like a
couple of dozen pink and brown tails hung from the forehead. There were no
primary eyes or nose or mouth, although random human sized ones were visible
sporadically throughout the body. It wasn’t clear which, if any of those, were
functional. Did all of the various minds link up, or were there multiple people
in the monster wrestling for control?

One giant arm and fist stood out,
perfectly formed and as long as the body was tall. The nails were dark and
extended. Stone could be seen caught underneath one of them. A dozen or more
dark and hairy rats escaped from the underworld as the monster emerged. The
rodents look terrified. They looked more like panicked victims than diseased
vermin.

It took a good ten seconds of firing
for the infected mass to fall back down into the underground and break up into
its individuals.

“Damn! Why was that so hard?” Dix
asked rhetorically.

“The compound infected were always
unusually sturdy and dense. Their secretions have unusual properties, which are
very different than the single subjects,” Greg answered.

Anya’s suit moved forward a few
paces, so that she could peer down the hole. Another rodent emerged, no less
terrified than the ones who had come before. “What’s down there?”

“That’s the subway,” Dix answered.

“Actually, it looks like the sewer
system,” Greg corrected him. “They used to run water beneath the streets to
carry their excretions away.”

“The infected?” Dix asked, repulsed.

“No, the regular paleo-humans. We’d probably
still do it on the Mars if it was practical. The method worked fine for
hundreds of years.”

“It doesn’t seem very sanitary,”
Anya turned her nose up. “But I guess they couldn’t sterilize it back then.”

“That’s right. It was actually after
we left Earth that we figured that trick out. We had to if we were going to
rebuild the population with limited resources.”

Dix was getting sick of Greg showing
him up and thinking he was smarter than he was, but he kept quiet.

They marched into the city center facing
only minimal opposition. Their guns tore the undead apart and their heavy metal
feet crushed over the wriggling pieces. A part of Dix couldn’t help but think
of them as people. He understood that the disease destroyed their minds. He’d
read about it and seen the films. The infected were nothing but hungry animated
flesh. They weren’t human, but they looked it. As hard as he was, Dix couldn’t
help but grimace as the bullets sunk into the flesh of what looked like men and
women. It was easier when their faces were flushed with anger, when they looked
evil. But not all of them did. Many of the infected looked quiet and peaceful.
Some didn’t even look up as his suit mowed them down, as their skin burst and
they broke open.

It bothered him more than he expected.
He kept that to himself too.

Greg led them to the hospital. Anya
and Dix positioned themselves around him to defend while Greg took some time to
scan the area. He had to find out if what they were looking for was there, and
if it was, what entrance they needed to use.

He asked the voice in his head to
play the Paleo-Earth album again. It made the violence seem less real when it
was scored. He could pretend he was in a movie-game instead of really being on
Earth itself and blowing up real people. But after a few songs, it began to
have the opposite effect. The lyrics were about the passage of time, getting
older and closer to death. He felt like the words were written only to be
played right then, to talk to him about what he was doing. He turned it off
again.

“Do you wish we could stay?” Anya
suddenly asked.

“What do you mean? Now?” Dix
replied.

“I guess. I mean, wouldn’t it be
better to have a whole planet? Wouldn’t it be better if we could go outside
sometimes?”

Her question was ridiculous. “I
guess, but then we’d have all the dead trying to eat us all the time.”

“I mean if we could kill them
first.”

“Well then yeah, of course. Who
wouldn’t want to live on Paleo-Earth? You know, it’s funny.”

“What?” Anya asked.

“You’d think that our living in
outer-space would mean that we were freer and our lives were more…open. There’s
so much space down here. Not even the governors get the kind of living space
the paleo-humans had.”

Anya laughed.

“What?” Dix asked.

“Living
space? Dix, Earth is beautiful. We’ve lost a lot more than living space.”

In the distance, Dix saw more
monsters moving towards them. He adjusted his suit’s stance to make it easier
for the automatic guns to get a bead on them when they drew a little closer.

“I’d like to see an elephant,” Dix
said, almost just to himself, but the mic was on. “They say there might be some
still in the wild. No one knows.”

Anya laughed. “They’re probably
extinct. I read they were probably all extinct.”

“Nobody knows, so they might still
be alive. Even if there aren’t elephants there would be lots of different
animals. Maybe there are a few bears or lions or rhinos? I’d love to meet a
rhino.”

“He’d eat you,” Anya teased.

“I taste horrible,” Dix smiled as he answered. Just at that moment his guns
roared back to life firing into the undead, the infected.

“Tell them!” Anya whispered over the microphone.

It was just a few moments later that
Greg finished his scan. “Alright. It isn’t here, but I found out where it
probably is. They used to have a facility in Kentucky, in America. I ran a
boost through the old outernet signal and a got a response. The systems were
unintelligible, but on.”

“So, the power there is on?” Anya
asked.

“That seems to follow,” Greg
confirmed.

“How could that be after all this
time?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be cheap, but
they had the technology. You probably won’t find a dozen buildings on the planet with the lights still on, but
this one is still pinging,” Dix answered

“Were there a lot of infected in
Kentucky?” Dix asked.

Greg’s voice suggested he thought it
was a stupid question. “Kentucky is in America, so yes. There were a lot of
infected in America.”

End Chapter One. Full story available soon on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and everywhere you wanna be!